Seminar 40 // 30, 31 May, 1 June 2013 // London

(for those without Goldsmiths Student Cards: we will be there at 10.45 to help you get into the building)

11 am – 2 pm:

Presentation by C/K participant Vipash Purichanont

"Thailand’s military coup d’état took place in 19th September 2006. A year after, the military junta announced a new constitution, which is the 17th after Siamese revolution in 1932. The constitution reestablished an extraordinary juridical power which created political conflicts, including the May 2010 uprising in Bangkok that resulted in a massacre. When the state of exception becomes a norm, struggles of sovereign subjects have developed their complexity to the degree that oppositional political action could not be addressed within state power. Political life can be living only by its absence, and the subject is included into state power by its exclusion. This creates the condition of mere life, a life that cannot pursue happiness within its community.

My research focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of communicability that he develops from Walter Benjamin’s. Researching on forms of life that take on various names from political prisoner to refugee, and on their communicability in artworks, documentary films and found footages, I am exploring modalities of communication in language as well as a notion of the non-communicable as possibilities to retrieve a political life. As parts of the presentation, I will discuss the photography project ‘Abhaya: Burma’s Fearlessness’ by James Mackay, and show an excerpt from Rithy Panh’s ‘S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine’."

"The second part of my presentation will be dedicated to a reading and discussion of passages from Benjamin’s text and some excerpts from Agamben. I would like to particularly focus on the notion of the non-communicable and its relations to meditation, contemplation, namelessness and the unnamable."

Thursday, 30 May 2013, 6 - 8 pm:

Location: RHB Cinema (main building, ground floor)

Book launch of Gerald Raunig’s book ‘Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity’ and panel discussion with Gerald Raunig, Emma Dowling and Susan Kelly, moderated by Stefan Nowotny

Gerald Raunig’s new book unfolds the worlds of cognitive and creative labour as new territories of existence and resistance. Based on a thorough critique of the ‘mode of modulation’, in which we constantly reform and deform ourselves and the worlds around us, the book draws lines of desertion into other, molecular forms of living and organizing. Here and now, the university as a factory of knowledge becomes a place of condensation, of assembly, and of re-appropriation of space, and the industry of creativity turns into a plane of wild, disobedient, non-subservient industriosity.

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher who works at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the eipcp in Vienna.

Emma Dowling is a writer and a lecturer in Sociology at Middlesex University, London.

Susan Kelly is an artist, activist and writer, and teaches Fine Art at Goldsmiths.

(for those without Goldsmiths Student Cards: we will be there at 10.45 to help you get into the building)

11 am – 2 pm:

Lecture and discussion with Gerald Raunig and Ruth Sonderegger

Beyond Educational Justice: Modulation and resistance in the edu-factory

We are cogs in the wheel of an increasingly modularized society, and at the same time we modulate ourselves and the world around us. The mode of modulation is both a striating, standardizing, modularizing process and a permanent movement of remodelling, modulating, re-forming and de-forming the self. The university, too, is a focal point of this dual modulation, for it is a place where time and space are neatly compartmentalized, where ever smaller modules are produced, and where standard systems of measurement are deployed. And yet, it is also a place of indivisible, endless, boundless modulating, a place of the appeal to modulate knowledge and the self.

In this situation traditional concepts like educational justice and invocations of civic equality do not suffice to offer a contemporary mode of resistance. We want to focus instead on the post-Operaist concepts and practices of exodus/desertion as well as on Michel Foucault’s last lectures that revolve around parrhesia (truth telling, literally: all speech, outspokenness). It is particularly the Cynic mode ofparrhesia that Foucault is interested in and that we would like to re-articulate in view of today’s edu-factories. Whereas Socratic parrhesia puts the emphasis on guiding and advising individuals as to how to change and/or un-learn modulating practices, Cynic practices of parrhesia focus on collaborative attempts to lead a both militant and philosophical life devoted to truth.

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher who co-directs a program in Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts and works at the eipcp in Vienna.

Ruth Sonderegger is a philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Irit Rogoff will continue her readings of Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked. The Politics of Performance as an entry point to this filmed interview project and the discussion of questions revolving around its detailed conceptualization, choices of interlocutors, the setting up of a questionnaire, etc. The focus this time will lie on chapter 7 of Phelan’s book, ‘The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction’.